


Chattanooga

by LucyAnne



Category: Cherry Almanac
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:20:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27374086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LucyAnne/pseuds/LucyAnne
Summary: A U.F.O. is seen.





	Chattanooga

(CW: Abusive relationships, physical assault, psychological damage, abandonment, and substance abuse)

It’s quiet out there. In between gusts of sandy current that pepper her exposed skin, there’s a silence few people born in the last decade can claim to have ever known. _Wicked unnerving_ , she thinks, but it’s a welcome break from the seventeen hours of mid-2000’s butt rock that constitutes Theo’s playlist.  
He’s asleep now, passed out in a pool of vodka and piss; the only thing cooling him from the ninety-seven-degree wall of heat that presses in from all sides on the dingy little trailer they’ve rented, making to crumple it like a poorly-built submarine. The AC is broken, though whether it was like that when they got here or was broken by Theo during a fit of rage mere moments after they’d checked in is a matter still up for debate disputed.  
She secretly hopes he doesn’t wake up this time, or at the very least that one of the gun-toting locals puts him in his place when he eventually wakes and decides to go bitching to the clerk about the hole he’d put in the room’s only cooling system several hours earlier. She runs through this imagined scenario in her head, unaware of its seedy connotations but still allowing it to draw her train of thought to the handful of dilapidated road signs they’d seen on their way into town. Even driving past at seventy-three miles-per-hour, it was clear that each one had been riddled with bullet holes, likely the work of bored yokels with nothing better to do with their dismal desert existence than to light up the skies around their home in a feeble attempt to rival the shadowy firepower that constantly looms over their heads.  
She ponders this for a moment, contrasting the detached temperament of the wasteland with its physical qualities that surround her. She looks around, shielding her eyes from the harsh glare of the sun as she takes in the voidful basin with its swathes of joshua trees interspersed with menacing dust devils that seem to graze the bottom of the clear blue sky. Here, and now, she comes to an understanding of how truly alone she actually is. It frightens her. Nearly forty miles from even the smallest speck of civilization, and here she is, a defenseless woman, hiking, alone, through the remote expanses of the Northeastern Mojave. Anything could happen out there, and there would be no one - save for her assailants or alien abductors or the scorpion that stings her - to hear her wail into the desolate arid plains.  
The fear turns rather quickly, curdling into something more desperate and vile, and her thoughts drift, as they so often do, to the image of that wasted sluggard sprawled out in a bed she knows they won’t be sharing that night if she even makes it back in one or two pieces. _It’s his fault_ , she thinks, _that everything’s like this_. A revelation as scarce as hen’s teeth to her, conditioned as she is to harshly blame her own shortcomings for every problem she encounters. It is not an idea that lasts long, and soon she again begins biting her own hide for being so carelessly naïve.  
She stomps forward, her own anger revving its engine alongside that of the blister forming on the back of her achilles every time her oversized combat boot scrapes into her a message that she should’ve worn socks. Another thing she should have seen coming. She has no socks because Theo _had_ no socks, which meant that her socks were quick to become his, and if she’d taken a single moment to reflect on this, then maybe she could’ve picked some up in the last town they passed through. But she didn’t, and now she suffers adequately in response.  
About half-a-mile ago, the sweat-soaked makeup wedge she’d stuffed down the back of her footwear to keep it from chafing so badly had fallen out, inched up the inside of its leathery prison with every step taken until at last it saw sunlight and tumbled away on a dusty breeze. About a quarter-of-a-mile back, she’d realized this and decided to press on anyway, too stubborn to let something as trivial as major septic threat keep her from finding what she’s come here for.  
She’s been walking now for what feels like hours. Probably because it has been. She glances nervously up and over at the sun, which still hangs bright but falls with every passing second into a place where not even her stubborn obsession with climbing the mountain will be able to ignore the dimming of the light and the knowledge that Theo will be expecting, though not awaiting, her return. And that, for her, is not an option. If one good thing is going to come out of this miserable road trip, it’s that she’s going to do something right for once and cross this damn thing off her bucket list.  
Fortunately, it’s just up ahead, or so she imagines. The path she’s been following winds around a bend she can’t see the end of, but still, it’s close enough to the descriptions she’d found on reddit to fill her with an unsteady confidence that what she’s seeing is really what she’d set out to see: Tikaboo Peak. The last place on Earth from which lowly citizens like her can spy from a distance the blocky white compounds of Area 51. Gritting her teeth, she steels herself and launches forward onto a path that now begins to ascend up the length of the slope that it circles.  
/Un/fortunately, a gremlin of ill-will is squatting in the dirt, sitting comfortably just out of sight, until it isn’t. Through a cloud of dust and flock of circling turkey vultures, she can just barely make out the apogee of her planned ascent; not an area at the mountain’s tip, thank God, but a widened cliff ledge pretty close to it. This is her goal, and standing in the way is a winding trail which daunts her shaky reserve. A fly that’s been following her for the last fifty feet while flitting obnoxiously about her peripheral vision lands teasingly on her sunburned wrist. She slaps at it instinctively and makes to press on, if only to rid herself of this pesky insectoid companion.  
While she might come from a place famously rife with mountains, they’ve left no mark on her the way they have her rock-climbing partner. This is a definite source of worry, but she presses on regardless, swiftly reaching a point at which her own two feet are no longer sufficient vehicles of transport, and she is reduced to using both hands as well to hoist herself up the precarious slope. With even greater speed, a point is reached where every other step she takes results in a grim cascade of shale being displaced by her movement and sent rolling down the hill behind her.  
She tries not to think about how easy it would be to join those falling rocks, and instead her mind fills again with images of Theo. She tries directing her attention away from the part of him marked by pretention, and instead towards visions of his auburn curls, chipped front tooth, and cheeks that are prone to blushing. This does not last long, however, and soon her mind ventures down a slightly more specific path.  
It flashes to that night in December, when he first told her that he loved her. The Christmas lights behind them glinting off the beads of water that formed every time a wayward snowflake melted on his rosy little nose had seared themselves into her brain forever. They’d held hands through a pair of worn mittens; one on her right hand, one on his left. He’d neglected to bring his own out of some weird, masculine pride, yet had complained until she’d agreed to share her own.  
At the time, she thought it had been cute, and admittedly, part of her still did. It was there, walking through a minefield of yellow snow she was too entranced to address that he’d told her in the dreamiest, most wistful voice in the world of his hometown in Tennessee, and his plans to return there someday.  
“You should come with me,” he’d said, squeezing her hand through the cloth. “If you wanted… we could make a whole trip out of it.”  
“I’d like that a lot,” she’d said, gently squeezing him back.  
It flashes to the year after that, when payments on her student loans he’d agreed to have his grandparents periodically help with stalled, following an argument they’d had about what color to paint their newly shared room. He’d assured her that it was a mistake, that he’d talk to his relatives about it soon. But the payments had never resumed, and she ended up having to get a second job as a parking valet to help pay it off herself.  
It flashes to a month ago, when she’d gotten up to use the bathroom, only to be knocked back on her ass by a stone faced Theo. They hadn’t been fighting, or even speaking for over an hour leading up to her decision to move, but had in fact been on opposite sides of the room, reading. An hour passed in which she’d fought with every muscle in her body to get up from the futon he shoved her back onto every time she tried to do so. After the first ten minutes and a good deal of yelling, she’d learned to stay put. He hadn’t said a word the entire while, knowing full well that his actions were enough. Nothing needed to be said or done beyond what he was already doing to show her with what ease he could both be and control her entire world.  
A sharp rock or perhaps a root of some dehydrated plant protruding from the edges of the thin path she skirts catches her at the base of her tibia, and the momentum of her increasingly fevered clamber sends her pitching forward, spilling the open canteen she’d gripped in one hand and slamming both her elbows down simultaneously onto a flat plate of limestone.  
It is a moment or two before the pain hits her, after which she rolls and wretches at the sting of an injury she already knows to be little more than a wind-knocking scrape. But it is because of this knowledge and a perceived overreaction to it that she begins, not for the first time that day, to cry. Through the tears, she catches sight of the already-nearly-evaporated puddle that’s spilled from her bottle and begins lambasting herself for wasting what little water her body has left on a fit of childish sobbing.  
This stops the flow of tears, but worsens her sense of despair. Despite knowing full well that an attempt to continue climbing with no regard for the fading sunlight and worsened conditions is the only thing that will actually threaten her life at this point, she casts her line of sight back up the trail to see how far she has yet to go. It is more than she hoped, and far too much to realistically cover with the small amount of time she has left. Caught between two places of vastly disproportionate probability and desire, she collapses back into the dirt and lays there in sun that quickly becomes shade.  
An hour passes, then two. Soon, she knows, she’ll have no choice but to return to the base of the mountain and slink back to her trailer like a coyote licking its wounds. Then, she knows, she’ll have to contend with Theo. His demands and reprimands are not what she fears in this moment, however. Having to admit to him (whether with words or the look of defeat he’s always been able to see in her eye) that she failed in her quest is what really frightens her. She knows that all he’ll do in response is smirk, but to her, that smirk is an act of ruin.  
By now, a few stars have begun peeking through the veil of twilight. One such twinkling in particular manages to catch her bloodshot eye. She thinks that it’s a star, for the first few seconds it’s in view. Then it begins moving, and still she thinks the clarity of a place free from light pollution has afforded her a glimpse at a flaming piece of astronaut shit that’s considered a rare treat in the bustling metropolis she hails from. Only when the orb, glimmering and distant, halts its trajectory and comes to a dead stop does the awe begin to strike her. Within as slim a span of time, or perhaps even slimmer, the light takes off at a perfect right angle, headed towards her diagonally and at an unfathomable distance above.  
The last thing she remembers thinking before everything goes white is thinking that maybe what she’s seeing isn’t unique to Nevada at all, that maybe, just maybe, if our skies were clear of their smog and radiation, we’d see that above us at all times is a night that swarms with a life all its own.  
She comes to at the base of the mountain, standing upright before her car, bag untouched and keys in hand. It is late, and the last few rays of sun are beginning to be yanked out of view from the glowing force that sinks behind the mountains at the end of another revolution. She blinks once, and only once, before unlocking the vehicle and pulling out onto a lone stretch of highway that extends outwards into dozens of miles of free-range nothing.  
At the end of that nothing, she knows, is a tiny collection of trailers which somehow constitutes a town, and that in one of those trailers lies Theo, awake and seething or drunk and obscure, but no part of him concerned for her whereabouts or safety. She thinks of nothing beyond her own failure as she drives back towards that unchancy destination, until a memory forms as if from nothing, a single smooth pebble dropped into a lake from above.  
She sees herself atop the peak, gazing out on miles of untouched wilderness as before, though here the altitude bestows upon her the chance to see up and over the range of towering rocks which formerly eclipsed her view. Though her binoculars remain tucked away in the recesses of her pack, she can see an impossible distance and with clarity unimaginable where the cluster of low, brutalist bunkers that mark the location of that infamous, nondescript Air Force base she knows are rumoured to be… but this is not what she sees.  
Tucked away in a fortress of stone and sand lays a fortress in itself; a dazzling, glimmering, glowing and pulsating, glittering and fulgurating, sparkling, scintillating, iridescent kingdom which burns as a cigarette in her mind, scarring with painful cauterization the memory of those Christmas lights on Theo’s face which has already started to fade. For her, a new memory has been formed, and a new day won. With the back of her hand, she wipes free the tears welling in her right eye and speeds past at a distance the trailer where someone she does not know does all but wait for her to return.


End file.
